Advocacy Group Says Trans Athletes Have Won Over 2,293 Girls' and Women's Golds, Report Unverified

Concerned Women for America Legislative Action Committee released a report on Tuesday, September 22, claiming transgender athletes have won more than 2,293 gold medals in American women's and girls' sports since the mid-1980s.

The group timed the release to a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing titled "Standing Up for Women in Sports: Ensuring Opportunity, Fairness and Safety for Female Athletes," held Wednesday, September 23.

What the report claims

CWA says its numbers come from HeCheated, a website that tracks transgender participation in female sports categories across amateur and professional events. According to the group, transgender athletes have competed in more than 14,301 female sporting events and won more than $501,498 in professional prize money. In California alone, CWA counted more than 611 instances where a woman or girl finished second to a transgender competitor.

CWA says every one of those figures has grown since its last report in July 2025.

"It is shockingly unfair for biological women to have to compete against trans-identifying men," said Penny Nance, CWA's president and CEO. "Our research finding that trans-identifying males have stolen over 2,293 gold medals from women in the United States is an outrage. Biological men have distinct advantages over biological women. This reality not only puts women in harm's way, but it eliminates opportunities for biological women to earn a living and win competitions. Congress must act to protect biological women."

The methodology question

The 2,293 figure is CWA's own tally, built entirely on data from HeCheated, which is itself an advocacy-run tracker, not a government agency, sports federation, or independent research body. Breitbart, which first reported the figures, noted plainly that the medal count "has not been independently verified."

No neutral third party, whether the NCAA, the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, or an academic research group, has audited how HeCheated defines a qualifying event, cross-checks results, or avoids double-counting across the thousands of amateur and professional competitions it tracks going back four decades. CWA's number is only as solid as the underlying database, and that database was built by people already committed to the conclusion.

That doesn't mean the figure is wrong. It means it's an advocacy group's count of an advocacy tracker's data, not a peer-reviewed or government-audited statistic. Readers should treat it the way they'd treat any single-source claim from an interested party: real numbers, unverified pipeline.

What advocates for trans inclusion would say

Groups that support transgender athletes' participation in women's categories generally argue that hormone therapy reduces performance differences over time, that the number of transgender athletes competing at the elite level is small, and that blanket bans exclude people from sport entirely rather than addressing case-by-case competitive fairness. None of those groups are quoted in CWA's release or in the coverage of it, and no rebuttal to the 2,293 figure has been publicly issued by a rival research organization as of this writing.

The policy push

Nance used the report to call on Congress to pass three bills: the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act of 2025 (H.R. 28/S. 9), which would bar federally funded school athletic programs from letting biological males compete in girls' and women's sports; the Protection of Women in Olympic and Amateur Sports Act (H.R. 1028/S. 405), which would require national sports governing bodies to designate women's categories for women only; and the Title IX Clarification Act (H.R. 8781/S. 5179), which would define "sex" under Title IX as biological status at birth.

CWA also cited its own internal polling, saying 69.3% of Americans consider it very or somewhat important that candidates oppose forcing female athletes to compete against or share locker rooms with biological males identifying as female. As with the medal count, that poll is CWA's own commissioned research, not conducted by an outside pollster.

The Senate Judiciary Committee's Wednesday hearing gave lawmakers a forum to weigh these claims and the underlying legislation. None of the three bills CWA is pushing has passed both chambers of Congress as of this writing. Whether the committee moves any of them forward, and whether an independent body ever audits the HeCheated data CWA's count relies on, remain open questions.